welcome! jeremy freese is a professor in sociology at northwestern university. he finds blogging to be a good diversion from insomnia and a far better use of time than television.

Monday, September 05, 2005

the sisterhood of the too-big-for-me-now traveling pants

Another Monday weigh-in:

So, over the past 15 weeks:

One of the things I did this weekend was try on every single pair of pants, jeans, and dress shorts that I brought with me from Madison to Cambridge. Turns out there were 46 pairs.

You may recall that, awhile back, I asked people if I should just toss the clothes that were too big for me now that I've lost back almost all of The Great Weight Gain of 2003. The consensus answer was that I should throw these clothes out (or give them away) as a show of optimism and faith, especially since, should I become an obesity recidivism statistic and gain all this weight back, I could always just go out and buy new clothes. Instead, I decided to figure out what of the 46 pairs fit and what didn't, and put what didn't plausibly fit anymore in a single box on a shelf in one of my closets that is high enough that I won't generally notice it.

(Incidentally, as you might imagine this was a much happier task than whenever it was after the Great Weight Gain of 2003 that I figured out all the clothes I had become too fat for and put those in a similar box far out of view.)

But, anyway, why did I save these clothes? Sometime soon, y'all may be subjected to a post pouring out of me about the answer to the increasingly-oft-asked question "So, Jeremy are you just going to gain all this weight back?" The short answer is that: yes, I do have optimism and faith in myself. But what I've lost here is just some weight, not my sense of objectivity. I know a weight-gaining beast lurks inside of me, and what will happen if it comes unchained. And, while it is true that I could just go out and buy all new clothes, it's pretty depressing to go out and buy new clothes because you've gotten too fat for the ones you have.

In the week before I left Madison, I ran into a second- or third-year graduate student in the hallway I hadn't seen for awhile. "Jeremy, you're wearing shorts?""What do you mean, I wear shorts to the office regularly when it is summer."*"I've never seen you in shorts before." And she was right, because I haven't worn any shorts to campus the past two summers, because I didn't have any "dress" shorts that fit and I didn't want to subject myself to a Clothes Shopping Trip of Humiliation just to buy some stupid shorts large enough to fit around my suddently jabbathehuttish posterior.

* Other departments/universities may frown on this, for all I know. Madison, to it's credit, doesn't.

12 comments:

Wisconsin is not so casual that one can wear dress pajamas to the office (as a faculty member, I mean, actually I've seen graduate students wearing things that did look a lot like pajamas), so I guess they would not be in the same category.

This whole question of what is too casual plagues me sometimes, you know. But I really don't see the point of going out looking for "appropriate" clothing that I don't particularly like when I'm not even TAing. Plus, part of the reason I worry is that I really am not very good at distinguishing between "basically appropriate" and "slightly inappropriate." Still, I am not planning to wear the pleather pants I found for $4 at Savers today to office, so at least I have some rudimentary sense of decorum.

Anyway, congratulations on the renewed rate of loss! I had a slow week myself--only 1.2 pounds, and I think I may have actually inadvertently slowed my own metabolism by not using enough of my activity points, so this week I'm trying to use about half of them. I did, however, drop below 150 and get cut to 20 points a day.

RWS: I'm suspicious of the whole metabolism slowing down theory, so long as differences aren't drastic. Couldn't it just be that you either (pessimistically) caught the lower end of the fluctuation in these things last week or (optimistically) caught the high end of the fluctuation this week. I think my loss for the last week looks a little more than it should because I had a weight on the high side of my fluctuation the week before (and perhaps on the low side this week).

Well, given that I lost about exactly half as much weight this week as last, while generating about twice as many unexchanged activity points... I'm not sure how the physics of that works, unless there was a change in how my body burned fat.

You failed to note that when I mentioned that I'd never seen you in shorts before, I advocated for the wearing of swimming trunks. Bathing suits will be the new fad in academic dress, if you start wearing them at Harvard and all. Then RWS can wear her pleather pants without a SINGLE qualm.